A hopping club late on a Saturday night? Not quite. It’s the middle of a Sunday afternoon, and we are at a Thanksgiving Daytime Party in a bar on Purvis Street, organised by the creative collective Secret Pals. “Just pals, helping pals in secret” goes their tagline, coined by co-founders April Luistro, a graphic designer and creative strategist, and Patrick Gerard Elicaño, a freelance photographer and writer. The latter’s on the deck, spinning a mix of groovy hip hop, the street-style techno beats of budots, and familiar Filipino pop songs. But this party’s also a regional one; it’s a tie-up with OnlyPans Taqueria, a Mexican restaurant based in Manila, and the servers are dishing out tacos in their bright red “Hot Girls Eat Tacos” tees. As I watch everyone dancing around me, I realise I’m standing at the intersection of multiple temporalities as time zones, rest time, circadian rhythms, and music tempo all begin to blend into one.

In music, the mood of a song is significantly influenced by its tempo. This is measured in beats per minute, or bpm. I played the trumpet for my secondary school band, so most of my teenage years were ordered by the cyclical pulse of the metronome: click, clack, clack, clack, click, clack, clack, clack, click. Classical music theory associates different tempos with different moods. There’s adagio, or at ease in Italian, the tempo marking for slower pieces of music. At 55-65 bpm, this pace sits slightly below the typical resting heart rate. Allegro, on the other hand, is lively, bright and fast, and indicates that music should be played at speeds between 120-168 bpm. This is also our heart rate when we’re exercising. Tempo allows us to not only keep time, but also feel time.